Note: The features discussed in this post will be rolling out over the next three weeks.

We have several exciting new features this sprint, including Pull Request and Release Management improvements. Let’s get into the details!

Work item search for discussions

Work item search now supports searching the discussion field. Users can discover relevant content in discussions both by full text search and by applying the discussion filter (discussion:) to the search query.

Pull Request filtering by people

It’s now easier to find pull requests! We’ve added new filtering options to allow you to find PRs created by a specific author or assigned to a specific reviewer.

Simply select a user from the author or reviewer filter, and the list will be updated to show only the PRs that match the filter.

Reason required when bypassing pull request policies

Users that are bypassing pull request policies must now specify a reason. In the Complete pull request dialog, users will see a new Reason field, if they choose to bypass.

After entering the reason and completing the pull request, the message will be displayed in the Overview.

Add and view Git tags

View git tags on commits

If your team has been using Git tags to mark a specific point in the history of your repository, then your commits will now show the tags that you have created. You will be able view tags for a specific commit in the commit list view and the details page.

Add tags to commits

Instead of creating tags from the command line and pushing the tags to the repository, you can now simply go to a commit and add a tag. The tag creation dialog will also let you tag any other ref on the repo.

The commit list view also supports a context menu. No need to go to the commit details page to create tags and create new branches.

Coming soon:

• Tags page that shows all tags in a repository
• Ability to delete tags

Updated Changeset and Shelveset pages

We have modernized the changeset and shelveset pages in TFVC. Both pages are made more accessible for our customers who use assistive technologies. The new pages also have a new header that contains the changeset title and associated information about the changeset, such as author details.

Both changeset and shelveset pages also host the a new markdown discussion control that will allow to type comments in markdown, @mention users, associate work items using #, and easily attach files and images.

Import repositories from TFVC to Git

Users can migrate code from their TFVC repositories to Git repositories in the same account. To start migration, select Import Repository from the repository selector drop-down.

Individual folders or branches can be imported to the Git repository, or the entire TFVC repository can be imported (minus the branches). Users can also import up to 180 days of history.

Multiple recipients included on the same email (preview)

With this feature enabled, the recipients of an email notification are combined on the TO line of a single email. Previously, individual emails were sent to each recipient. This made it difficult to know who else received the notification and to have a conversation about the activity over email. Also, if you are a member of multiple groups that receive a notification, you will now only get one email, instead of one per group.

This feature applies to default (out of the box) and team subscriptions that are capable of targeting multiple recipients. For example, with this and the Out of the box notifications feature enabled, all reviewers (except for those that have opt’ed out) of an updated pull request will be included on a single email.

This feature can be enabled by an account admin by switching on the account-level Combine email recipients via the Preview features panel under the user menu.

Conditional build tasks

If you’re looking for more control over your build tasks, such as a task to clean things up or send a message when something goes wrong, we’re now offering four built-in choices for you to control when a task is run:

If you are looking for more flexibility, such as a task to run only for certain branches, with certain triggers, under certain conditions, you can express your own custom conditions:

and(failed(), eq(variables['Build.Reason'], 'PullRequest'))

See Specify conditions for running a task.

Package Management adds npm READMEs and download button

You can now see the README of any npm package that includes a README.md in the package. READMEs can help your team document and share knowledge about your packages.

You can also download any npm package using the Download button in the command bar.

Updated Package Management experience available to all accounts

After some additional tuning and some bug fixes, we’ve made the updated Package Management experience available to all accounts. Learn more about the update here, or turn it on using the toggle in the Packages hub.

Override template parameters in Azure resource group deployments

Currently in Azure resource group deployment tasks, users select the template.json and the parameters.json and provide the override parameter values in a text box, following a specific syntax. This experience is now enhanced so the template parameters are rendered in a grid which allows them to be edited and overridden. Users can access this feature by clicking the ... next to the override parameters field, which opens a dialog with the template parameters along with their default values and allowed values (if defined in the template and parameter .json files). This feature requires that CORS rules are enabled at the source. If template and parameter json files are in Azure storage blob, refer to this documentation to enable CORS.

Continuous Delivery in the Azure portal supports any Git repo

You can now configure a continuous delivery (CD) workflow for the Azure App Service no matter which Git repository you use to manage your code. Until now, you could select an App Service in the Azure Portal and setup continuous delivery for that service in just a few clicks, but only if you managed your code either in a Visual Studio Team Services Git repository or in GitHub. You can now get the same simple experience for any public or private Git repository, provided that repository is accessible from the Internet. With a few clicks in the Azure portal, you can set up a build and release definition in Team Services that will periodically check your Git repository for any changes, sync those changes, run an automated build and test, followed by a deployment to Azure App Service. As your needs evolve, you can customize these definitions to support multiple environments, more complex testing, or deployment upon manual approval.

Separation of duties for deployment requester and approvers

Previously, environment owners could restrict release creators from approving deployments of the release to an environment. Users could, however, manually start deployment of a release created by another user, and approve it themselves.

We have now filled this gap by considering the deployment creator as a separate user role for deployments. Either the release creator or deployment creator can be restricted from approving the deployments.

Set maximum number of parallel deployments

This feature gives you control on how multiple pending releases are deployed into a given environment. For example, if your release pipeline performs validation of builds in a QA environment and the rate of generation of builds is faster than the rate of completion of the deployments, you may configure multiple agents and as many builds to get validated in parallel. That means each of the builds generated gets validated, and the wait time is dependent in the number of available agents.

With this feature, we let you optimize validations by enabling you to perform validation on the n most recent builds in parallel and cancel the older deployment requests.

Q&A support for Marketplace extensions

Users can now post questions for any extension on the Marketplace from the item details page and have one-on-one public conversations with publishers of that extension. Email notifications are sent to publishers (owners and contributor roles) and users when a question is posted or responded to. With this, users now have two distinct feedback channels: one to rate or review an extension and the other to ask questions and receive answers from publishers.

Enhancements to display publisher’s terms, license, and privacy policy in Marketplace

It is now mandatory for all paid extensions on Marketplace to have a License and Privacy Policy. The License and Privacy Policy can be defined in the manifest file under the links property. More details are available at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/integrate/extensions/develop/manifest.

The License and Privacy Policy is also available in the extension details page and presented when the user downloads the extension.

Improved sign-out

In the past, users have been unable to completely Sign out of their account when clicking Sign out. With these changes, users will be able to globally sign out from all Visual Studio resources. The vast majority of users should see no impact from this change, but we have found that some customers may experience issues signing into the product due to group policy–based security settings around trusted sites. This only affects sign in/out using Edge and Internet Explorer. Other browsers will be unaffected.

During sign-in, if you are redirected back to the sign-in page again, you are likely encountering this problem and you can either switch browsers or add an entry into your Internet Options trusted sites zone. In addition, organizations experiencing this can correct the group policy for their entire organization in a similar manner. More information can be found in the KB article.

We think these features will help improve your workflows while addressing feedback, but we would love to hear what you think. Please don’t hesitate to send a smile or frown through the web portal, or send other comments through the Team Services Developer Community. As always, if you have ideas on things you’d like to see us prioritize, head over to UserVoice to add your idea or vote for an existing one.

Thanks,

Jamie Cool

This week we begin rolling out our sprint 115 work.  You can read the release notes for details.  As usual, this is a forewarning of the changes, it could take up to 2 weeks before all the changes are visible in your account.  The update should go live in the first public accounts today.

Overall, there’s not any single thing that stands out for me in this release.  A lot of good stuff but nothing revolutionary.

• We continue to make the pullrequest/code review experience better.  Every sprint we are taking feedback and implementing it.  We’re still not very close to done yet but the experience is pretty darned good now – I’d argue that it’s the best PR experience in any product available today.
• The new package management UI refresh went live this sprint and I think it has some nice improvements.
• CI/CD remains, probably, our biggest aggregate investment right now and makes a lot of progress every sprint.  Some stuff we are targeting for the //Build conference in May where I think we’ll be able to unveil a whole bunch of significant advancements in this space.

There are also a couple of themes driving work we are doing right now that I’d like to talk about.

• Compliance – Increasingly the VSTS code pipeline PR -> CI -> Test -> Release is getting used, both internally and externally, by team with strict compliance requirements.  We’re building more and more compliance supporting features into the pipeline and you can see several in this sprint – the PR review policy changes and the Release management initiator/approver role segmentation are good examples.
• Accessibility – Something that didn’t really even show up in the release notes but is, none-the-less, a pretty big investment right now is accessibility.  I think it doesn’t show up for a couple of reasons – 1) It’s mostly manifested as bug fixes and 2) It’s work in flight so it’s not done yet.  But, it’s something that will get better every sprint.  A few months ago, we had a blind engineer come and demonstrate for me what using VSTS/TFS was like for someone who is visually impaired.  I have to say it was a humbling experience for me.  We kicked off a significant effort across the product to substantially improve and it’s already getting much better.  I expect this effort will continue until mid-summer, at which point, the product should be very usable by people with visual disabilities.

Thanks and feedback is always welcome,

Brian

Millions of developers around the world use the power of C# and .NET to deliver amazing apps. Whether you’re building for desktop with Windows Forms or UWP, or for the web with ASP.NET WebForms, or MVC, .NET’s flexible tools and frameworks help you ship software that solves almost any problem. In the mobile world, Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin enable .NET developers to easily apply their existing expertise to build, test, distribute, and monitor native apps for all the major connected platforms, including Android, iOS, UWP, tvOS, and more, all from Visual Studio 2017.

Our team of mobile experts at Xamarin University have taught thousands of developers—from experienced enterprise team leads to recent grads—how to expand their desktop and web development experience to mobile. Now, we’re making it even easier to jumpstart your mobile development skills with flexible monthly subscription options.

Available immediately, you can sign up for Xamarin University from the Visual Studio Marketplace, which offers monthly payment options and the ability to use Azure subscriptions. Starting at $83.25 per month (less than $3 per day), you receive unlimited access to constantly updated curriculum, with topics such as C# for beginners, to classes covering the latest in navigation styles and controls for Android and iOS.

As a monthly subscriber, you can:

• Select from 80+ virtual and on-demand classes and videos
• Join live sessions across multiple time zones led by mobile experts and featuring hands-on labs and demos
• Get advice, code reviews, and best practices for your projects during 1:1 Office Hours
• Collaborate and learn from peers
• Get certified as a Xamarin Mobile Certified Developer
• Access exclusive on-demand videos from industry leaders covering the latest mobile topics and challenges, from new platform APIs to testing and deploying on physical devices

As you learn mobile best practices and UI design, our courses grow with you, offering intermediate and advanced classes on how to performance tune and test your apps, diagnose memory issues, and use a variety of design patterns and techniques to maximize code-sharing across Android, iOS, and UWP apps.

To get started today, visit the Visual Studio Marketplace and subscribe to Xamarin University to get immediate, unlimited access to courses, hands-on labs, 1:1 office hours, and more. If you haven’t had a chance to try Xamarin University, start your free 30-day trial today to experience everything Xamarin University has to offer. If you have any questions, we’re always available at training@xamarin.com.

Mark Smith, Principal Program Manager Mark leads Xamarin University, where he helps developers learn how to utilize their .NET skills to build amazing mobile apps for Android, iOS, Windows and beyond. Prior to his career at Microsoft and Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft), Mark ran a consulting business, specializing in custom development

With the introduction of the Bing iMessage Extension, people can express themselves with GIFs, search and easily share places, movies, and more from the web, without leaving the conversation. To get started, simply get the Bing app for iPhone and enable the Bing iMessage Extension through iMessage.

Express Yourself with Hilarious GIFs

Share What You’ve Previously Found or Find Something New

Make Plans for a Group Movie and Meal Out

While sharing a Bing link was a good way to pass along content that users had common interest in, surfing back and forth between messaging friends and sifting through a multitude of movies or restaurants is a hassle. The Bing iMessage Extension allows you to share a restaurant or movie card directly so it’s easier and quicker to make plans.

Easily check out what’s in theaters with a group before committing.

Search and then share multiple restaurants with a group of friends to help make a decision.

To make sure you have access to the new Bing iMessage Extension, download the Bing app.

- The Bing Team

This week we begin rolling out our sprint 115 work.  You can read the release notes for details.  As usual, this is a forewarning of the changes, it could take up to 2 weeks before all the changes are visible in your account.  The update should go live in the first public accounts today.

Overall, there’s not any single thing that stands out for me in this release.  A lot of good stuff but nothing revolutionary.

• We continue to make the pullrequest/code review experience better.  Every sprint we are taking feedback and implementing it.  We’re still not very close to done yet but the experience is pretty darned good now – I’d argue that it’s the best PR experience in any product available today.
• The new package management UI refresh went live this sprint and I think it has some nice improvements.
• CI/CD remains, probably, our biggest aggregate investment right now and makes a lot of progress every sprint.  Some stuff we are targeting for the //Build conference in May where I think we’ll be able to unveil a whole bunch of significant advancements in this space.

There are also a couple of themes driving work we are doing right now that I’d like to talk about.

• Compliance – Increasingly the VSTS code pipeline PR -> CI -> Test -> Release is getting used, both internally and externally, by team with strict compliance requirements.  We’re building more and more compliance supporting features into the pipeline and you can see several in this sprint – the PR review policy changes and the Release management initiator/approver role segmentation are good examples.
• Accessibility – Something that didn’t really even show up in the release notes but is, none-the-less, a pretty big investment right now is accessibility.  I think it doesn’t show up for a couple of reasons – 1) It’s mostly manifested as bug fixes and 2) It’s work in flight so it’s not done yet.  But, it’s something that will get better every sprint.  A few months ago, we had a blind engineer come and demonstrate for me what using VSTS/TFS was like for someone who is visually impaired.  I have to say it was a humbling experience for me.  We kicked off a significant effort across the product to substantially improve and it’s already getting much better.  I expect this effort will continue until mid-summer, at which point, the product should be very usable by people with visual disabilities.

Thanks and feedback is always welcome,

Brian

Today, we’re thrilled to announce a partnership with BrowserStack, a leader in mobile and web testing, to provide remote virtual testing on Microsoft Edge for free. Until now, developers who need to test against a specific version of Microsoft Edge have been limited to local virtual machines, or PCs with Windows 10 installed. However, there are many developers that don’t have easy access to Microsoft Edge for testing purposes.

BrowserStack Live Testing can run Microsoft Edge inside your browser on macOS, Windows, or Linux.

Today, we are excited to partner with BrowserStack, which provides the industry’s fastest testing on physical devices and browsers, so that you can focus on delivering customers the best version of your product or website. BrowserStack is trusted by developers at over 36,000 companies, including Microsoft, to help make the testing process faster and more accessible. Under this new partnership, developers will be able to sign into BrowserStack and test Microsoft Edge using their Live and Automate services for free.

Live testing provides a remote, cloud-based instance of Microsoft Edge streamed over the web. You can interact with the cloud-based browser just as you would an installed browser, within your local browser on any platform – whether it’s macOS, Linux, or older versions of Windows.

As testing setups are becoming more automated, we are excited to also offer BrowserStack’s Automate testing service under this partnership, for free. This method of testing allows you to run up to 10 Microsoft Edge test sessions via script, which can integrate with your local test runners via the standardized WebDriver API. You can even configure your machine so that the cloud-based browser can see your local development environment—see the Local Testing instructions at BrowserStack to learn more.

Testing Microsoft Edge in BrowserStack using WebDriver automation

To ensure you can test against all possible versions of Microsoft Edge that your users may be using, BrowserStack will be providing three versions of Microsoft Edge for testing: the two most recent “Stable” channel releases, and the most recent “Preview” release (via the Windows Insider Preview Fast ring).

You can test Microsoft Edge on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (EdgeHTML 14) starting today. EdgeHTML 15 will be available in the Windows 10 Creators Update starting on April 11, 2017, and will come to BrowserStack in the following weeks.

BrowserStack currently serves more than 36,000 companies globally including Microsoft, AirBnB, and MasterCard. In addition to Microsoft Edge, the service provides more than 1100 combinations of operating systems and browsers and its Real Device Cloud allows anyone, anywhere to test their website on a physical Android or iOS device. With data centers located around the world, BrowserStack is trusted by over 1.6 million developers relying upon the service as it provides the fastest and most accurate testing on physical devices.

We’re very excited to partner with BrowserStack to make this testing service free for Microsoft Edge. Head over to BrowserStack and sign up to get started testing your site in Microsoft Edge today.

― Jason Weber, Director of Program Management, Microsoft Edge

The post Announcing free Microsoft Edge testing in partnership with BrowserStack appeared first on Microsoft Edge Dev Blog.

Millions of developers around the world use the power of C# and .NET to deliver amazing apps. Whether you’re building for desktop with Windows Forms or UWP, or for the web with ASP.NET WebForms, or MVC, .NET’s flexible tools and frameworks help you ship software that solves almost any problem. In the mobile world, Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin enable .NET developers to easily apply their existing expertise to build, test, distribute, and monitor native apps for all the major connected platforms, including Android, iOS, UWP, tvOS, and more, all from Visual Studio 2017.

Our team of mobile experts at Xamarin University have taught thousands of developers—from experienced enterprise team leads to recent grads—how to expand their desktop and web development expertise to mobile. Now, we’re making it even easier to jumpstart your mobile development skills with flexible monthly subscription options.

Available immediately, you can sign up for Xamarin University from the Visual Studio Marketplace, which offers monthly payment options and the ability to use Azure subscriptions. Starting at $83.25 per month (less than $3 per day), you receive unlimited access to constantly updated curriculum, with topics such as C# for beginners, to classes covering the latest in navigation styles and controls for Android and iOS.

As a monthly subscriber, you can:

• Select from 80+ virtual and on-demand classes and videos
• Join live sessions across multiple time zones led by mobile experts and featuring hands-on labs and demos
• Get advice, code reviews, and best practices for your projects during 1:1 Office Hours
• Collaborate and learn from peers
• Get certified as a Xamarin Mobile Certified Developer
• Access exclusive on-demand videos from industry leaders covering the latest mobile topics and challenges, from new platform APIs to testing and deploying on physical devices

As you learn mobile best practices and UI design, our courses grow with you, offering intermediate and advanced classes on how to performance tune and test your apps, diagnose memory issues, and use a variety of design patterns and techniques to maximize code-sharing across Android, iOS, and UWP apps.

To get started today, visit the Visual Studio Marketplace and subscribe to Xamarin University to get immediate, unlimited access to courses, hands-on labs, 1:1 office hours, and more. If you haven’t had a chance to try Xamarin University, start your free 30-day trial today to experience everything Xamarin University has to offer. If you have any questions, we’re always available at training@xamarin.com.

Mark Smith, Principal Program Manager Mark leads Xamarin University, where he helps developers learn how to utilize their .NET skills to build amazing mobile apps for Android, iOS, Windows and beyond. Prior to his career at Microsoft and Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft), Mark ran a consulting business, specializing in custom development

In Episode 124 of the Office 365 Developer Podcast, Richard diZerega and Andrew Coates discuss the resources available for getting started with Office 365 Development.

Download the podcast.

Weekly updates

• SharePoint PnP webcast—what is the SharePoint PnP JavaScript core library? by  the PnP team
• SharePoint Framework Roadmap by the SharePoint team
• Registration open for Microsoft Ignite 2017 by Microsoft
• Rencore webinar—building client-side web parts with the SharePoint Framework by Rencore
• Free SharePoint Framework training by Voitanos/Andrew Connell
• Troubleshooting and fixing the “out of the blue, my SharePoint Framework projects won’t build!” by Andrew Connell
• Azure AD B2C access tokens by Paul Schaeflein
• Controlling Groups creation in a tenant using the AAD V2 PowerShell module by Mikael Svenson
• Get the SharePoint site behind an Office 365 Group via the Microsoft Graph by Elio Struyf
• The SharePoint admin bot by Rick Van Rousselt
• Microsoft Bot Framework—contextual authentication with the webchat control in SharePoint by Rick Van Rousselt

Show notes

• Modern JavaScript for ancient web developers
• Create an insane developer workstation in the cloud
• Office 365 dev program
• Getting Started with Microsoft Graph
• Microsoft Graph on GitHub
• Getting started with Office add-ins
• Getting started with SharePoint add-ins
• Getting started with the SharePoint Framework
• Getting started with Office UI Fabric
• Getting started with Office 365 Connectors
• Getting started with Microsoft Teams
• Getting started with Skype development
• GitHub training content

Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available on iTunes or search for it at “Office 365 Developer Podcast” or add directly with the RSS feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast.

About the hosts

Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and a frequent speaker at worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at aka.ms/richdizz and can be found on Twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician and lightning-fast runner.

A Civil Engineer by training and a software developer by profession, Andrew Coates has been a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft since early 2004, teaching, learning and sharing coding techniques. During that time, he’s focused on .NET development on the desktop, in the cloud, on the web, on mobile devices and most recently for Office. Andrew has a number of apps in various stores and generally has far too much fun doing his job to honestly be able to call it work. Andrew lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and two almost-grown-up children.

Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center
• Office 365 main blog
• dev.office.com blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• FlipBoard
• Slack channel

StackOverflow

• http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev
• http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev
• http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev

Yammer Office 365 Technical Network

• O365 Dev Podcast
• O365 Dev Apps Model
• O365 Dev Tools
• O365 Dev APIs
• O365 Dev Migration to App Model
• O365 Dev Links
• UserVoice

The post Episode 124 on getting started with Office 365 development—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

I’m excited to announce that Syscoin and its parent company, Blockchain Foundry, have recently launched three blockchain products which are now LIVE on Azure.

Developers can now deploy:

1. A full Syscoin node through Azure.
2. Stand up and configure customized exchange rates for use in Syscoin’s distributed marketplace via Syscoin’s Price Peg Server.
3. Access Syscoin’s entire suite of blockchain-based services and smart contracts via the Syscoin API.

Through Syscoin’s API product, developers can create blockchain-enabled applications using Syscoin’s suite of decentralized business services, including digital certificates, secure messaging, marketplace offers, payments and escrow transactions. 

Syscoin and Blockchain Foundry are important partners on Azure. We are proud to welcome them to the platform and we look forward to an ongoing partnership with the team.  

Syscoin’s suite of blockchain products can be deployed here: Syscoin Product Suite.

We are excited to announce that Azure Advisor, Monitor, and resource health are generally available to you today, providing you with robust monitoring & alerting capabilities, and customized recommendations based on best practices. Your feedback during the preview release helped us prioritize the right set of capabilities that are now generally available.

We have been using these services internally for quite some time to run and monitor Azure at scale, and starting today, you can leverage them to monitor, receive alerts and notifications when your Azure resources aren’t performing according to your plan. Furthermore, they provide recommendations when resources can be optimized. All this can be done via the Azure portal and/or programmatically via APIs.

If you are running your virtual machines on Azure or using other Azure services, you can benefit from these capabilities today. You can, for example, access a wide range of metrics for your VMs with Azure Monitor, create alerts and get deeper insights with Log Analytics. If your VMs are underutilized, Azure Advisor will provide recommendations that can save you money. Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.

Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations, and guides you through the best practices to optimize your Azure resources. By analyzing your resource configuration and usage, Azure Advisor provides guidance that helps you to improve the availability, security, performance, and cost effectiveness of your Azure resources.

Visit the Advisor webpage and if you’re already an Azure customer take a look at your Advisor recommendations right now.

Azure Monitor is the built-in platform monitoring service that provides a single pipeline for monitoring and diagnostics data across all Azure resource types, enabling you to easily monitor, diagnose, alert, and notify of problems in your cloud infrastructure. It provides platform metrics with one minute granularity by default.  Azure Monitor now includes improved alerting and notifications such as SMS, email, and webhook. While Azure Monitor provides platform-level telemetry, you can gain deeper visibility into application telemetry and operational insights from Azure Application Insights and Azure Log Analytics respectively. Collectively these services help you unlock a comprehensive monitoring and management experience across your platform, apps, and workloads, all within the Azure portal.

To learn more about Azure Monitor, read the blog post and visit the Azure Monitor webpage.

Azure resource health helps you diagnose and get support when an Azure issue impacts your resources. It informs you about the current and past health status of your resources and helps you mitigate issues. Resource health provides technical support when you need help with Azure service issues.

To learn more about resource health, explore the documentation and if you’re an existing Azure customer review resource health page in your Azure portal.

All of these new capabilities are available today without needing to install any additional agents or configuration. 

As mentioned, many customers are already experiencing the combined power of these Azure services going into general availability today. For instance, “Azure Log Analytics and Azure Monitor offer very strong capabilities out of the box, and the extensible nature of these services allowed us to very quickly develop our production monitoring offering,” says Dugan Sheehan, Principal Product Architect - Azure Cloud at Rackspace. “Leveraging these services allows Rackspace the time to focus on other unique and leading customer centric support features and drive significant value to our customers”.

We’re proud to launch these new capabilities and it’s great to hear the feedback and excitement from you too.  Log-in to the Azure portal now and let us know how you like it.

February didn’t hold the title of best month on record long – it’s already passed that title to March! A huge thanks to our publishers and customers who continue to grow the ecosystem of extensions around Team Services. This month I’ve got extensions in our Agile and Work Item space that are pretty new and really great.

SpecMap

See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=techtalk.specmap

Story Maps provide a great tool for visualizing a user’s activities and the hierarchy of stories your team will need to deliver on to have the greatest impact. SpecMap brings Story Maps to Team Services and your Work Items are the Story Map elements.

What are Story Maps?

From SpecMap’s documentation: A typical story map has a hierarchic structure involving user activities and user stories. The story maps tell stories from the user’s perspective and represents the user’s progress through the system as a series of activities. The first step is to describe the user’s progress through the system using a narrative flow that can be depicted using user activities.

Once these user stories have been discussed and defined by your team, the next step is to prioritize development to deliver the biggest impact possible over the next development cycle. User stories are assigned to activities and arranged vertically by priority (higher priority items at the top). Finally the story map is divided into horizontal slices, with each slice typically representing a single iteration or sprint.

Conceptual Story Map showing User Journey axis, Priority axis, User Activities, and Sprint Slices

SpecMap takes what would normally be done with sticky notes or whiteboards and allows you to create Story Maps directly inside Team Services, linking the items to your backlog

SpecMap translates physical Story Map techniques into backlog solution managed directly in VSTS

Getting Started with SpecMap is easy, and is definitely worth a look!

Board Group

See it in the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ottostreifel.board-group

I’m a big fan of KanBan boards, and Board Group gives me a small optimization I have always thought is a good idea, the ability to modify the lane and column of a Work Item from the work item form. It also adds the ability to change the lane and column from the board without dragging and dropping. Definitely check this extension out if you’re a KanBan board user!

New Work Item form section showing assigned board, and the active column/lane

New menu on board items allowing the modification of column without dragging

Are you using (or building) an extension you think should be featured here?

I’ll be on the lookout for extensions to feature in the future, so if you’d like to see yours (or someone else’s) here, then let me know on Twitter!

@JoeB_in_NC

We have updated the Maps platform for the Windows 10 Creators Update to give our maps a cleaner, more beautiful and realistic look so that it’s consistent between web and UWP apps. We are also making Road view look more authentic by adding layers of terrain, where previously the Road view appeared flat. In addition to an updated 3D engine, we have delivered added features that our users requested for certain areas of visual improvements, like styling, offline capabilities, routing and others.

Just a quick note regarding the improvements to the engine: even though we go through many compatibility tests and make our best effort to minimize impact to third-party apps, it is always possible that something might have slipped through. This would be a good time to review your apps and confirm that the updated Maps platform is working as expected for your scenarios.

With that out of the way, please see the highlights below around some of the top asked-for features.

Map Styling APIs

We are happy to announce a set of Map Styling APIs for Windows 10 Map Control. The styling APIs will allow you to customize the look and feel of the map canvas on the fly. As a developer you will be able to control the map rendering by dynamically disabling or changing the styling characteristics of a layer or to emphasize certain aspects of the map canvas.

Map customization features are supported for regions where Windows 10 Map Control performs vector rendering, which includes all markets except for China, Japan and South Korea. Since vector mode supports offline storage for all layers, the maps customization feature is available for both online and offline modes.

Customizing the map

You can customize the look and feel of the map by using the new MapStyleSheet and setting the StyleSheet property of the MapControl. Think of a map stylesheet as a set of custom rules defined in JSON markup which can be combined to override our styling defaults. It allows you to customize colors, fonts and visibility status of various map elements, such as roads, areas (e.g. building structures, parks, water) and political features (e.g. city titles).

Here are some great examples of re-styling layers or specific primitives within a layer in the Windows 10 Map Control:

Spooky Map

Some of you might remember the Spooky Map that we released over a year ago in Bing to celebrate one of our favorite holidays. Back then we had just revamped our styling system and our team had a lot of fun coming up with this Halloween theme.

The Spooky road map style is rendered by Windows 10 Map Control through changing the land color, the color for the neighborhood labels and the fill color for areas such as airports, cemeteries and education structures.

Winter Map

The Winter road map style is rendered by Windows 10 Map Control through changing the land color, the color for neighborhood labels and the fill color for the areas such as cemeteries, education structures and military bases.

Gray Map

The Gray road map style is rendered by Windows 10 Map Control through changing the land and water color, the color for all labels and the fill color for all areas and map elements such as roads, railways, runways, transportation network lines and structures.

3D Map Engine

The map engine that is shipping with Windows RS2 update is a 3D map viewer.  It displays objects on top of the terrain and uses globe or web Mercator projection model for vector rendering and map interactions. Vectors are full 3D objects in a 3D scene. To place 3D objects correctly, the engine uses elevation data on the vertices of the vector geometry. If you don’t supply the altitude values to render points and polylines, they will simply be draped over the terrain surface.

Here are some of the major changes to keep in mind.

3D Scenes

Both Road and Aerial maps now support 3D views and elevation data. As you might remember, a 3D perspective of the map can be specified by using MapScene. While the map scene represents the 3D view that appears in the map, the MapCamera represents the position of the camera that would display such a view.

Labels created by the 3D map engine are placed laying down or standing up in the 3D scene to improve readability and visual quality. They also use a distance-fade occlusion rule with other 3D geometry indicative of their actual position in the scene. Because the map view can show both oblique and nadir views, as well as 3D topology, it is important to carefully set your view so that the obstacles, (such as mountains) do not get in your way. To help with this, the control supports the concept of scenes as a primary tool for establishing the best views. Via TrySetSceneAsync methods, you can establish different perspectives and the map will automatically choose the best camera for that perspective based on the environmental factors—including the user’s current view within the map.

Las Vegas Strip, oblique view from the east

For more details, see Display Maps with 2D, 3D and Streetside Views.

Displaying points of interest (POI) on the map

Typically, with marking points of interest (POI) on a map the first thing you consider is using pushpins, images, shapes and/or XAML UI elements. However, one of the main things to consider when adding points of interest to a 3D map should also be altitude and the AltitudeReferenceSystem to be used.

You’ll need an altitude reference system to indicate what the altitude value is relative to. If you specify Terrain, the altitude value will be relative to the terrain and will not include surface objects like trees or buildings. Ellipsoid altitude value will be relative to WGS84 ellipsoid, while Surface altitude value will be relative to the surface and will include objects such as trees and buildings that are on top of the terrain. Geoid altitude values are currently not supported by the Maps API.

Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, pushpin using zero surface altitude

Using different map projections

The map engine supports both a standard Web Mercator projection and a 3D globe projection now. The developer specifies the map projection of the MapControl that you want to use through the new MapProjection property.

MapBillboard

Along with the 3D enhancements to the existing MapElements, we added a new MapElement called MapBillboard. This new API can be used to display images or signage on the 3D map. Similar to the MapIcon API, MapBillboard displays an Image at a specific location on the map. However, it behaves differently in that it acts as if it was part of the 3D scene: the image scales with the rest of the 3D scene as the camera zooms and pans.

Offline Maps

In the past developers had to direct users to the Settings app for users to download Offline Maps. To streamline these scenarios, we added the OfflineMapPackage API which allows you to find downloaded packages in a given area (Geopoint, GeoboundingBox, etc). You can check and listen for downloaded status on these packages as well as trigger a download without the user having to leave your app.

https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-universal-samples/tree/dev/Samples/MapControl

Other changes

API Updates and Additions

For a list of the APIs added since Windows 10 Anniversary Update, please see here the following resources:

• Offline maps
• MapBillboard
• MapControl
• MapStyleSheet

For more details on all new APIs go to MSDN.

The post New MapControl features in Windows 10 Creators Update appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

Almost 11 years after we created CodePlex, it’s time to say goodbye.  We launched CodePlex in 2006 because we, like others in the industry, saw a need for a great place to share software.  Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of amazing options come and go but at this point, GitHub is the de facto place for open source sharing and most open source projects have migrated there.

We migrated too.  As many of you know, Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as our “One Engineering System” for proprietary projects, and we’ve exposed many of our key open source projects on GitHub (Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, .NET, the Cognitive Toolkit, and more).  In fact, our GitHub organization now has more than 16,000 open source contributors – more than any other organization – and we’re proud to partner closely with GitHub to promote open source.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched many CodePlex projects migrate.  During the same period, we’ve had to address several issues, including a spam epidemic over several months in 2015, as spammers sought to take advantage of the CodePlex.com domain to boost their illicit activities.  We’ve also seen a substantial decrease in usage: as of this writing, less than 350 projects saw a source code commit in the last 30 days.

The shutdown plan

So, it’s time to say goodbye to CodePlex.  As of this post, we’ve disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects.  In October, we’ll set CodePlex to read-only, before shutting it down completely on December 15^th, 2017.  In its place, we’ll have a lightweight archive that will allow you to browse through your project and source code as it looked when CodePlex went read-only.

Migrating your data

We’re providing two first-class ways to get your data out of CodePlex.  First, we’ve partnered with GitHub to provide a streamlined import experience to help you bring your CodePlex source code, license, and documentation to GitHub.  A migration tool for issues is also in the works and will be available soon – we’ll update this blog post with more details when it’s available.  And, we’ve added a new option to your project to set an “I’ve moved” banner on your project that will direct your users to your new home. There’s a walkthrough on the CodePlex wiki to help you through the migration process.

Second, the CodePlex Archive will allow you to download an archive file with your CodePlex source code, releases, documentation, issues, and license, all in common formats like Markdown and JSON.

If you’d like to migrate just your source code, you have a variety of options depending on your source control type. For Git users, many Git hosting services, including Visual Studio Team Services and BitBucket, offer an easy import flow to help you migrate. Bitbucket also offers import for Mercurial users.

We’re here to help

As you use these tools, CodePlex support is standing by to help via email.  GitHub is also ready to help if you encounter any issues with the import experience.

Thank you,

Brian

Are you using the legacy ASP.NET membership providers with your application?  When you look in web.config, is there a membership configuration within the system.web element?  The membership provider has been available since ASP.NET 2, and has been superseded by the Identity provider for a more secure authentication and authorization facility in your application.

Best practices in security today dictate that you should not be storing passwords in cleartext or in an encrypted format.  These values can be read or decrypted, and you will feel shame if your password list is published somewhere by a nefarious party.

Starting with ASP.NET 4.6.2, we have updated the MembershipProvider base when reading the PasswordFormat property.  If your application is configured with a setting that is not Hashed, we are now throwing a warning entry into the Windows Event Log that will encourage you to choose the more secure Hashed setting for your Membership configuration.

Event Log entry recommending hashing passwords

A hashed configuration will use the hash algorithm defined in the machineKey validation attribute.  By default, this value is set to “HMACSHA256”.  This attribute can be configured to hash with a number of different algorithms, and we no longer recommend using MD5 or SHA1 hashing.

Recommended Solutions

If you want to update an existing application to use Hashed passwords with Membership, we recommend that you force every user to reset their password at the same time you change the passwordFormat setting in web.config  To force this reset, the consult the following steps:

1. Ensure that all users have an email address configured in your membership repository.
2. Create a password-change page if you don’t have one already and link it to your user login page
3. Notify all the application’s users that they will be forced to reset their password on a scheduled date
4. On the scheduled date of your password reset, change the passwordFormat setting in web.config and update your membership repository to clear out all passwords stored.

In a default SQL membership repository, you could execute the following statement to clear all passwords:

UPDATE AspNetUsers SET PasswordHash=’’;

Ideally, we recommend that you update your application to use the improved ASP.NET Identity provider.  The newer provider enables several scenarios for integration with third-party authentication providers, two-factor authentication, and external notification systems like text messaging and email.  You can learn more about the Identity provider on our Identity announcement blog post.

Summary

We continue to support the membership providers for ASP.NET that were introduced in ASP.NET 2.0.  It is in your best interest to ensure that you are using them in the most secure configuration available.  Please take a few minutes and review your ASP.NET application’s configuration and determine if you should apply any updates.

At the recent Strata conference in San Jose, several members of the Microsoft Data Science team presented the tutorial Using R for Scalable Data Analytics: Single Machines to Spark Clusters. The materials are all available online, including the presentation slides and hands-on R scripts. You can follow along with the materials at home, using the Data Science Virtual Machine for Linux, which provides all the necessary components like Spark and Microsoft R Server. (If you don't already have an Azure account, you can get $200 credit with the Azure free trial.)

The tutorial covers many different techniques for training predictive models at scale, and deploying the trained models as predictive engines within production environments. Among the technologies you'll use are Microsoft R Server running on Spark, the SparkR package, the sparklyr package and H20 (via the rsparkling package). It also touches on some non-Spark methods, like the bigmemory and ff packages for R (and various other packages that make use of them), and using the foreach package for coarse-grained parallel computations. You'll also learn how to create prediction engines from these trained models using the mrsdeploy package.

The tutorial also includes scripts for comparing the performance of these various techniques, both for training the predictive model:

and for generating predictions from the trained model:

(The above tests used 4 worker nodes and 1 edge node, all with with 16 cores and 112Gb of RAM.)

You can find the tutorial details, including slides and scripts, at the link below.

Strata + Hadoop World 2017, San Jose: Using R for scalable data analytics: From single machines to Hadoop Spark clusters

Overview

The Creators Update is packed with new features for app developers and end users that are designed to delight developers who can offer their end users a rich experience.

User transition & data migration

Users are encouraged to download the store version of their desktop apps. If the user already has the previous desktop version of the app, the transition experience is as seamless as possible.

As a result, the Creators Update will provides a smooth transition along with some best practices for app developers to follow.

For a detailed blog post on this topic with code samples, please see this blog post.

User transition: taskbar pins & start tiles

Many users typically pin their favorite or most used apps to the taskbar pin or the start menu so they can access apps quickly.

With the Creators Update, app developers can re-route the taskbar pins and the start tile shortcuts to point to the store version of the desktop app.

User transition: file type associations & protocol handlers

The user may choose their favorite app to be the default app for a given file type or protocol. With the Creators Update, the developers can also transition the user’s choice to use the store version of the same app.

Data migration

As best practice, it is recommended that developers attempt to migrate previous user data from the desktop app upon first launch of the store version of the same app.

Users will love that they can pick up where they left off.

User transition: uninstall previous desktop app

As best practice, developers should offer uninstallation of the previous desktop app upon first launch of the store version of the app. This helps in avoiding user confusion and potential user data corruption.

Keep in mind the user can refuse the uninstallation of the previous desktop app, so the previous and store version of the app may end up running side-by-side. It is up to the app developer to decide whether or not to block the launch of the store version of the app until the previous desktop app is uninstalled.

Windows Explorer delight: previews, thumbnails, detailed properties and grouping by kind

Another focus of the Creators Update release was on user satisfaction.

Store versions of desktop apps can now take advantage of Windows Explorer perks to lead users to more frequently engage with their apps.

Preview handler

Preview handlers are triggered when an item is selected to show a lightweight, rich, read-only preview of the file’s contents in the view’s reading pane. You can do this without launching the file’s associated application.

XML sample:

<Extensions>
   <Extension Category="windows.fileTypeAssociation">
      <FileTypeAssociation Name="Foo">
         <SupportedFileTypes>
            <FileType>.bar</FileType>
         </SupportedFileTypes>
         <DesktopPreviewHandler CLSID="20000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001" />
      </FileTypeAssociation>
   </Extension>
</Extensions>

Thumbnail handler

In Windows Explorer, thumbnails can provide a read-only view inside the file when the viewing is set to medium icons or higher.

XML sample:

<Extensions>
   <Extension Category="windows.fileTypeAssociation">
      <FileTypeAssociation Name="Foo">
         <SupportedFileTypes>
            <FileType>.bar</FileType>
         </SupportedFileTypes>
         <ThumbnailHandler CLSID="20000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001" Cutoff="20x20" Treatment="Video Sprockets" />
      </FileTypeAssociation>
   </Extension>
</Extensions>

Property handler

Microsoft Windows Search uses property handlers to extract the values of properties from items, and uses the property system schema to determine how a specific property should be indexed. In addition, property handlers can be used to provide more details about a certain file in the properties dialog or in the details pane.

XML sample:

<Extensions>
   <Extension Category="windows.fileTypeAssociation">
      <FileTypeAssociation Name="Foo">
         <SupportedFileTypes>
            <FileType>.bar</FileType>
         </SupportedFileTypes>
         <DesktopPropertyHandler CLSID="20000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001" />
      </FileTypeAssociation>
   </Extension>
</Extensions>

Grouping files by their ‘kind’

Developers can specify what ‘kind’ their file types are, which will enable the end users to group their files by their ‘kind’ in Windows Explorer.

XML sample:

<uap:Extension Category="windows.fileTypeAssociation">
   <uap:FileTypeAssociation Name="scoobydoo">
      <uap:SupportedFileTypes>
         <uap:FileType>.m4a</uap:FileType>
         <uap:FileType>.mta</uap:FileType>
      </uap:SupportedFileTypes>
      <rescap:KindMap>
         <rescap:Kind value="Item" />
         <rescap:Kind value="Communications" />
         <rescap:Kind value="Task" />
      </rescap:KindMap>
   </uap:FileTypeAssociation>
</uap:Extension>

Support for custom fonts installation by apps

Microsoft Windows Store apps can share their custom fonts with other Windows applications. This is done by making a few simple edits to the application manifest.

XML sample:

<Extensions>
   <uap4:Extension Category="windows.sharedFonts">
      <uap4:SharedFonts>
         <uap4:Font File="FontsJustRealize.ttf" />
         <uap4:Font File="FontsJustRealizeBold.ttf" />
      </uap4:SharedFonts>
   </uap4:Extension>
</Extensions>

Public out-of-process COM server support, aka Packaged COM

Developers can now add support for out-of-process COM and OLE extensions support for store version of desktop apps. This technology is referred to as Packaged COM. Historically, desktop apps created COM extensions that other applications could use. However, in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update release of Desktop Bridge, an application cannot expose its COM extension points as all registry entries are in its private hive and not exposed publicly to the system. Packaged COM provides a mechanism for COM and OLE entries to be declared in the manifest while the underlying subsystem handles the activation of the objects while still providing no-impact install behavior.

Firewall Rules

When apps need the users to add the app as an exception to the firewall, it translates into user confusion, additional user clicks and/or denial of exception by mistake.

The Windows Security Alert tries to educate the user, but it’s still one more decision the user must make before they can use their app.

In addition, subsequent app updates will result in the same dialog pop up and take the user through the same flow.

With the Creators Update, the developers can register for firewall rules ahead of time, so the users don’t have to make a firewall choice prior to launching their apps (including after subsequent app updates).

XML sample:

<Extensions>
   <desktop2:Extension Category="windows.firewallRules">
      <desktop2:FirewallRules Executable="foo.exe">
         <desktop2:Rule Direction="in" IPProtocol="TCP" Profile="all"/>
         <desktop2:Rule Direction="in" IPProtocol="UDP" LocalPortMin="1337" LocalPortMax="1338" Profile="domain"/>
         <desktop2:Rule Direction="in" IPProtocol="UDP" LocalPortMin="1337" LocalPortMax="1338" Profile="public"/>
         <desktop2:Rule Direction="out" IPProtocol="UDP" LocalPortMin="1339" LocalPortMax="1340" RemotePortMin="15" RemotePortMax="19" Profile="domainAndPrivate"/>
         <desktop2:Rule Direction="out" IPProtocol="GRE" Profile="private"/>
      </desktop2:FirewallRules>
   </desktop2:Extension>
</Extensions>

Other noteworthy features

• Apps can be pre-installed
• Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) support
• Windows App Certification Kit now includes test cases for Desktop Bridge apps
• Use URL flag enables apps to directly open files from a URL instead of downloading a local cached version of the file

The post Desktop Bridge: Creators Update appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

If you've ever dreamed of being able to travel to the outer reaches of the galaxy and observe the double sunrise of a binary star over a distant planet, or see the twin ejection streams of a neutron star, or lazily graze the ice rings of a gas giant, now you can ... almost. Elite Dangerous is a game for the PC and Xbox with all the things you'd expect from a space game: space stations, combat and trading, but the part I love the most is the exploration. The game simulates nothing less than all 400 billion star systems of the Milky Way, and lets you roam among them. All of the planets, stars, nebulae we know about are there (including the recently-discovered Trappist-1 system), but that's a tiny fraction of the galaxy we know exists. The rest of the systems are procedurally generated under the cosmological principles as we generally understand them today, and you can visit every one (potentially at least). Exploration is a slow process — I'm currently towards the end of a month-long trek out beyond the Eagle Nebula — but it's relaxing in a Zen way and the views along the way are gorgeous.

The simulation is startlingly realistic: I was astounded when it became apparent as that distant nebula got larger with each jump that the background isn't a generic celestial sphere, but actually generated for each unique location you visit. If you see a star, you can head in that direction and see what planets are circling it (and even land on them). Each planet circles its star in real time, as does each moon about its planet, and each space station about its moon. But it's actually hard to appreciate the depth of the simulation in human time, because you don't typically hang around for a full day to see the rotation of a planet below. But Nicholas Breakspear used the game to make time-lapse movies of various scenes so you can see this galactic orrery in action:

If you'd like to see more, see Throttle Down 2. But for now that's all from the blog for this week. Have a good weekend — I'm going to see if I can make it to Colonia before we're back on Monday.

Spring is here and so is another weekend! Check out what you might have missed this week before diving into weekend projects.

Microsoft Store Services SDK launches support for interstitial banner ads

This week we announced the launch of interstitial banner ads support in the Microsoft Store Services SDK! Read more to learn how to add them to your apps.

Interstitial banner ads can earn up to 8-10 times more than standard banner ads. Add them to your app here: https://t.co/fnmyhFFOjZ

— Windows Developer (@windowsdev) March 27, 2017

Simplify payments in UWP Apps with the Payment Request API from Microsoft

The Windows 10 team wants to help you take advantage of new simplified payment options for Windows 10 UWP apps. Click through right here to find out how you can add these options into your apps.

Simple is smart. Simplify your UWP app's purchasing process with the Payment Request API here: https://t.co/BosXWyRAiW pic.twitter.com/6q72TqpZ5l

— Windows Developer (@windowsdev) March 28, 2017

New MapControl features in Windows 10 Creators Update

We have updated the Maps platform for the Windows 10 Creators Update to give our maps a cleaner, more beautiful and realistic look so that it’s consistent between web and UWP apps.

Keep in mind that just because you can now make a pink map doesn't necessarily mean you should make a pink map. https://t.co/cWWlEGh7YO

— Windows Developer (@windowsdev) March 31, 2017

Download Visual Studio to get started.

The Windows team would love to hear your feedback. Please keep the feedback coming using our Windows Developer UserVoice site. If you have a direct bug, please use the Windows Feedback tool built directly into Windows 10.

The post ICYMI – Your weekly TL;DR appeared first on Building Apps for Windows.

Sometimes Bing Studios can be a real zoo. On any given day, we may wrangle an African elephant, a glasswing butterfly, and a meerkat through the front lobby. But this is what it takes to give our fans those amazing animal photos that have become some of the most popular Bing homepages.

Once we get the critters through the door, they’re signed in and receive a visitor badge—corporate policy doesn’t just apply to us bipeds. Then it’s off to our photography studio, where various creatures sit for portraits or stage action shots.

Things sometimes go awry, as was the case for our April 1, 2017* homepage photo session, but the show must go on.

*No animals or crew members were harmed during the making of this April 1st edition of the Bing homepage